For the newcomer who will arrive in June

You haven't arrived yet. This letter is about what people were doing before you did.

Somewhere in this city, a group of volunteers sat down for their fifth or sixth meeting of the year in a room that probably had bad chairs, at 6pm or 7pm on a weekday, and worked through an agenda about how this place receives people. Some of them are immigrants themselves. Some of them have been in London long enough to remember what it was like before they were, and they think about that. They volunteer because they believe the receiving is something that has to be built, and that it doesn't build itself.

In April last year, fifteen people representing eight ethno-cultural groups sat together in a room at a City-owned building. A presentation on virtual health care. How to access it. What documents you need. How long it typically takes. This is not glamorous information. It is the kind of information you desperately need when you get here and cannot find. People decided that was a problem worth solving.

Earlier this year, workshops on microaggressions were delivered to staff at a local organization. Eighteen people. The workshops left materials behind that the organisations can keep using. These workshops didn't emerge from nowhere; they came out of a working group that spent a significant amount of time on research and then more time figuring out how to say difficult things without losing the room. It took longer than they expected. It usually does.

Fact sheets about immigration patterns in London and Middlesex went out to nearly 900 people on an email list. One of them covered retention: people who came to London between 2012 and 2020 have stayed here at higher rates than in many comparable cities. The people who received those fact sheets are the service providers you'll encounter when you arrive. They now know more about who stays and who leaves and some of the reasons why. That matters for how they think about the meeting with you.

Last June, 150 people walked together to commemorate a family killed on a street near here because of who they were. You may already know about that. The commemoration is about people choosing, year after year, to make that morning mean something beyond grief: a commitment to keep building a city that is not what that moment was.

The three-year plan that guides this organization's work until 2028 was shaped by over 200 contributors. Volunteers, community members, service providers, government representatives. You're not in it by name. You didn't exist in it yet. But the plan is for the person who arrives in June, the person who arrives in July, and the person who arrives in 2027 and doesn't yet know they're going to.

The people who built these things are volunteers. They're academics, settlement workers, retirees, and employed people who gave up weeknights. Some of them are newcomers themselves. Some of them know what you're going to feel in the first few months, when the language is still a little slippery, and the systems don't quite make sense yet. They remember it. They chose to spend their spare time trying to make it slightly less bewildering for whoever comes after them.

You don't owe them anything. The point was never to create a debt.

But if you get here and find something that helps, or a person who knows something useful, or a room that feels like it was expecting you, that isn't an accident.

Welcome to London.